The Dawn of the Innovators
It's time for innovation leaders to get out of 'zombie mode' and claim a strategic position in their organizations.
How to Make Open Innovation a Reality in your Organization
There is a lot of talk about open innovation. But what do you need to be able to really walk the talk and generate concrete results? Take this opportunity to learn how and to interact with industry leaders in an Expert Panel Discussion on September 27th. In this live session we will share experiences on implementing and executing open innovation and how to make it an integrated and recognized part of the innovation process.
Pulp Innovation Chapter LXXV: Who is the Customer?
While forming a plan of action for a business to business firm, Marlowe faces the dilemma of figuring out who is the nominal customer. Do they take for granted that their intermediate customers know their markets, and respond to their needs, or do they reach out and understand the end consumers’ needs?
Being First: Ten Innovation lessons from Mount Everest
Reaching the highest point of the Earth is one of the greatest expeditions of mankind. It made Edmund Hillary famous. After reading Hillary’s ‘View from the Summit’ Gijs van Wulfen shares ten innovation lessons on being 1st.
Creativity: Why it’s Better to Turn your Problems into Goals
When it comes to creative problem solving, which is more effective? Focusing on the problem at hand, or on setting goals for what we'd like to accomplish? Jeffrey Baumgartner explores this perplexing question and comes to a very clear conclusion.
Product Development: Do you Know what you Really Need?
Product development requirements often change in the course of a project, sometimes for the most arbitrary of reasons. Too often, the executives who ask for these "tweaks" fail to understand the significant ripple effects these changes can cause in terms of manpower, resource allocation and time, warns Michael Fruhling.
Innovation Ahead for Higher Education
Higher education is facing unprecedented levels of change - MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) providing remote access, new providers developing new approaches, students’ expectations and demands rising. These changes will increase competition and require radical innovation from existing organisations in order to survive.
Happiness, Meaning & Innovation
Can an organization be too customer oriented? What are the consequences of letting short term requirements of existing customers cannibalize the exploration of your own an agenda? How can a sense of meaning be reinstalled in disillusioned development organizations? Read Susanna's latest blog post to find out.
Pulp Innovation Chapter LXXIV: Gaining More Customer Insight
Marlowe and his team-mates sit down with an endless stack of customer satisfaction surveys and market research, however none of the documents paint the full picture they're looking for. The reports explain a lot about what existing customers think about existing products, but they don’t shed much light on their unmet needs. So the team starts to draft a proposal for ethnographic or qualitative research that will help uncover beneficial insights.
Innovating Nature
With global warming implicated in current droughts, storms, impending extinctions, sea level rise, and other harbingers of climate change, some experts are looking past the debate for placing the blame on humanity and questioning whether technological solutions could improve or injure humanity and the ecosystem which protects us. With geoengineering, the manipulation of the planet’s environment on a large scale, scientists are trying to innovate on nature for the sake of human survival, but could these technologies actually do more harm than good?
DAM Promising: Collaborative Innovation Meets Digital Asset Management
Media firms such as the BBC, HBO, and Corbus, along with brand-drive organizations such as Visa and the Estee Lauder Companies, hire people to manage their digital assets. Digital assets include content such as television shows, movies, photographs, and advertisements. Viewers and consumers create their own content, too, in response to shows and brands. Co-creation introduces new challenges for digital asset managers, including deciding what content to manage. In this article innovation architect Doug Collins explores possibilities for digital asset managers to apply the practice of collaborative innovation to help them do their own work more effectively.
External Risks of Innovation Projects
The fact that innovation is a risky business is well-known. But what are those risks? After the identification and the assessment of the internal and hidden risks of innovation projects Altin Kadareja now delves deeper into an exploration of the external risks of innovation projects, those risks that the company can/does not fully control, mostly related to factors external to the company, meaning coming mainly from its environment.
Pulp Innovation Chapter LXXIII: Opportunities & Threats
With three competing scenarios mapped out based on different market trends, Marlowe buckles down with the Accipiter team to identify the opportunities and threats among them. The next important steps towards developing new products depend on the unfolding opportunities identified in this process.
Get Innovative in Helping Employees to Accommodate Change
You can find in this article a grasp overview of reasons for change in our organization and how it could be boosted by applying innovative approaches.
Faster than Real Time Innovation?
Companies are better today at predicting consumer behavior than at any moment in time. How do they do it? Big data. In this article Saman Musacchio takes a look at the latest research and development trends and what they mean for the future of innovation.
3D Revolution Speeding Up
We first discussed 3D printing in 2008, highlighting potential applications, the increasing range of materials being used, and the growing complexity of products which could be printed. That progress continues creating both opportunities and challenges the impacts of which companies need to assess across their product ranges and supply chains.
The Perils and Possibilities of of Crowdfunding
Just because you can create a crowdfunding campaign for your next Big Idea doesn't mean you should, as book author Glenn Fleishman recently discovered.
Can Multi-tasking Result in More than 60% Longer Project Time?
You want to be perceived as a good innovation project member, to be appreciated for your achievements – and just to safeguard that notion some of what you do leads to a success in time – you do multiple projects in parallel. But is this really efficient and effective? Check out Bengt Järrehult’s somewhat mathematical look at multi-tasking, where the exercise of putting numbers in leads to a result that may surprise you.
How do Specialized Intermediaries Facilitate Creative Crowdsourcing?
One of the most obvious benefits of crowdsourcing is its ability to stimulate creativity and accelerate innovation on a global scale. Leading companies such as Dell, Starbucks or Frito-Lay have pioneered this trend by building platforms (respectively IdeaStorm, MyStarbucksIdea and Doritos Crash The SuperBowl) that connect them to a crowd of passionate individuals. These success-stories paint a very positive picture of crowdsourcing, but the reality is that connecting with the crowd is not as easy as it seems. In this post, we will present the advantages and drawbacks of using crowdsourcing to source creative ideas, and explain how specialized intermediaries can help companies by providing crowds, platforms and experience.
Pulp Innovation Chapter LXXII: The Art of Creating New Products & Maintaining Relationships
With a full plate at Accipiter Marlowe fears he has neglected his personal life to the point of no return, or is there still hope for a lonely innovation consultant?
7 Innovation Lessons From the First Man on the Moon
After reading Neil Armstrong’s biography, Gijs van Wulfen discovered there are many lessons from the Apollo 11 trip which can be applied to our everyday innovation projects. Here are seven inspirational lessons learned. Can you think of more?
Cardboard’s Increasingly Diverse Future
Cookers, bikes, beds, tents, a school club, computers, vacuum cleaners, coat hangers - they are part of a growing range of new applications for cardboard, old and new. A combination of trends is enabling this growth: consumer expectations to reduce and reuse packaging continue to rise; new processes are enabling more effective cleaning of paper for re-use; emerging nations are focusing on frugal innovation and new products to support growing aspirations and local markets.
Why HR and Finance will Love Collaborative Innovation
It’s good to have friends in high places as you transform the world through the practice of collaborative innovation. In this article innovation architect Doug Collins introduces you to your buddies in human resources and finance. Say hello!
Pulp Innovation Chapter LXXI: Well Stocked for Opportunities
When the crew from Marlowe Innovation meets for lunch they review their recent projects and new clients. With more requests for innovation training, they realize that many firms are discovering that they can bring in house a lot of the work they’ve outsourced to the bigger consultancies.